Platform data across thousands of locations shows that accurate hours, complete profiles and well-structured menus drive up to 5x more guest actions, but many operators’ attention is spent in other areas
NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / September 10, 2026 / Marqii, the most complete discovery platform built for hospitality businesses, today released its 2026 Industry Report, What Actually Moves the Needle on Restaurant Search Performance. Built from location-level engagement data across thousands of restaurant locations and a survey of restaurant operators, the report ranks the actions that improve search visibility by measured impact, and finds a persistent gap between what works and where operator time actually goes.
The findings point to an uncomfortable pattern. Operators are working hard on the right actions, but sequencing them wrong. The fields with the largest measured effect on guest actions are also among the least frequently maintained. That gap is widening as search consolidates: local discovery is now the default way guests decide where to eat, and generative AI assistants increasingly answer the question outright, composing responses from the same structured location data operators often don’t realize they control.
“Every operator I talk to already knows the list. Fix the hours, add the photos, answer the reviews,” said Avi Goren, Marqii Co-Founder and CEO. “What they don’t have is a clear priority order. This report is an attempt to give them one, and the results surprised us. The single highest-return action in the entire dataset is the one most brands treat as an afterthought. It turns out the hard part was never knowing what to do. It’s doing it consistently across every location and every platform at once.”
Marqii’s 2026 Industry Report identified five findings shaping restaurant search performance this year:
- Hours are the highest-return field on a listing. Locations that update their Google business hours even once average 177 daily search views, compared with 42 for locations that never do. The effect compounds with frequency: locations in the top quartile of update activity average nearly 300 daily search views and 23 direction requests, against 45 views and three direction requests for locations with no hours activity. Yet 43% of surveyed operators update hours only a few times a year. Nothing else measured in the report produces a larger swing.
- Profile completeness compounds across every guest action. Locations were scored into four completeness tiers, from Starter through Optimized. Profile engagement rises cleanly at every step. Optimized profiles average between four and five times the menu clicks, direction requests and website clicks of Starter profiles. Most of that gap is closable with information operators already have on hand. Photos remain the clearest opening: only 39% of menu items across the platform carry one, and 19% of operators describe their Google photos as minimal or unmanaged.
- Structure beats exhaustiveness on menus. Menu completeness does not improve engagement in a straight line. Locations with medium menu completeness average 205 daily search views and six menu clicks, outperforming both low-completeness locations (59 views, two clicks) and high-completeness ones (154 views, three clicks). These findings reframe the goal from completing everything to structuring the essentials well. Descriptions and photos, not more menu item attribute detail are the highest-value actions today.
- Review response is a scale problem, not a will problem. 72% of surveyed operators believe they respond to 90-100% of their reviews. In practice, fewer than 30% of brands respond to at least half. The gap widens as location count grows, which points to capacity rather than intent: operators want to respond, but at 20, 50 or 200 locations, doing it consistently by hand stops being possible.
- AI awareness outpaces AI action. 89% of surveyed operators are familiar with how AI is influencing restaurant discovery, and 57% describe themselves as very familiar and already thinking about it. Only 49% have made it part of their current strategy. Thirty percent plan to act but haven’t started, and 21% are not acting at all. Among non-adopters, the most commonly cited barrier was not budget or skepticism. It was not knowing where to start.
The common thread: search is consolidating into answers, and answers are assembled from structured data
The four actions ranked in this report are separate checklists for traditional and AI search. Accurate and regularly updated hours, complete profiles, structured menus and consistent details are what make a location legible to a search engine and quotable by an AI assistant, and both reward and punish the same things.
The report also documents what early movers are doing with that data. Seventy-five client accounts are now connected to AI assistants through the Marqii MCP, logging nearly 17,000 assistant calls over three months and climbing. Ninety-four percent of those calls were data analysis rather than agentic management of profile changes: a split Marqii reads as a substantial unclaimed opportunity, and evidence that the first-mover window is still open.
“Operators don’t need a separate AI strategy. They need the fundamentals executed consistently, which is a harder problem than it seems at 50 locations,” Goren said. “What the data keeps showing is that the brands pulling ahead aren’t the ones doing something complex. They’re the ones whose information is accurate, complete, and consistent enough that an assistant can quote it without hesitating.”
The Marqii 2026 Industry Report is available as a free industry resource. For more information and to access the full report, click here.
About Marqii
Founded in 2017 by Avi Goren, Evan Perlmutter and Bryan Rutcofsky, Marqii is the most complete discovery platform built for hospitality businesses. With dozens of POS integrations and connections to more than 70 listings sites including Google, Yelp, Facebook, Bing, and Apple Maps, Marqii automates updates to listings, menus, and websites to help every location get discovered and chosen by more guests. Marqii Review Management gives operators one place to track and respond to Yelp, Google, Facebook, OpenTable, GrubHub, Uber Eats, and ezCater reviews so they never miss a chance to engage with their guests, and AI review analysis features make it easy to take action on guest feedback. More than 15,000 hospitality businesses of all sizes use Marqii to rank higher in search results, and be found and chosen by more guests.
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Contact Information
Kelsey Verdier, VP of Marketing
kelsey@marqii.com
SOURCE: Marqii
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